Google shutters Realtime Search after Twitter deal expires

Tweet firehose still spraying into Bing, Yahoo

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Twitter's deal with Google to include updates in Mountain View's search results ended on 2 July.

As a result Google's Realtime Search function, which also provided feeds from Facebook fan page updates among other social network guff, went offline and is currently displaying a 404 error message.

Search Engine Land got this statement from Google explaining why the feature was no longer functioning online:

"Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2," said Google.

"While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google."

In addition, the tech giant said it plans to relaunch its Google Realtime Search function, but didn't offer up a date for when that might happen.

"Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources," the company told Search Engine Land.

In contrast, Twitter's deals with the likes of Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo search engines remain ongoing.

Google, which announced its latest social network effort Google+ just last week, said that the popular microblogging site had been a "valuable partner" and added it was "open to exploring other collaborations in the future". ®